This morning, looking out my window, I noticed that the branches of all the trees were filled with blackbirds. As if on cue, they all leapt from their branches and flew first north, then south, forming a three-dimensional grid pattern. How do these birds know when to take off and how to keep the other birds the same distance from them as they all wheel together, first one way then another? If they're concentrating on keeping a uniform distance from each other, how do they avoid hitting branches? It reminds me of the way we humans have been moving in parallel in our emotional reactions to the Obama victory. Maybe, deep down, we humans know what the flock of birds knows, though we usually insist on ignoring what we know. We are now engaged in a concerted action as a species, not wandering around the sky heedlessly bumping into things as we were a week ago.